Amid their third month as newly appointed DC co-bosses, James Gunn and Peter Safran finally revealed their plans for an inter-connective universe for the comic book giant spanning largely film and TV in a strategy unlike the Warner Bros. brand has ever had before.
Like Marvel’s phases, DC will have chapters, with Chapter One being “Gods and Monsters.” This chapter will unfold between 2025-2027 and include five films, including a Gunn-penned Superman Legacy, a new Batman and Robin title (The Brave and the Bold), a Swamp Thing feature, and films centering around Supergirl and the deeper universe DC rogue squad The Authority.
Safran and Gunn conceived their grand design with an assembled wristers room who riffed off the latter’s basic ideas. That group included Christina Hodson, Jeremy Slater, Drew Goddard, Christal Henry, and Tom King. The overall game plan is two movies a year.
It might seem like it’s all deep, deep universe stuff, straying from the core Batman and Superman of it all, but there’s a method to Gunn and Safran’s madness. “One of our strategies is to take our diamond characters – Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman – and we use that to help prop up other characters that people don’t know. Like what happened with The Guardians of the Galaxy in some way. Like taking teams like The Authority, which I know is a spectacular idea for a film with a completely different take on superheroes. Because it’s connected to Superman, it’s about to use those well-known properties to help lead into lesser-known properties,” says Gunn.
“We’re going to promise that everything from our first project forward is going to be unified,” continued Gunn. “We’ve gotten fortunate for the next four projects.” Those projects were what former DC boss Walter Hamada started: Shazam!, Fury of the Gods (premiering on March 17), and The Flash (premiering June 16). Gunn says The Flash “resets everything” and “is probably one of the greatest superhero movies ever made.”
Wiping away any doubt about the future of Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman, Jason Momoa’s Aquaman, and Zachary Levi’s Shazam, Sefran emphasized, “these four movies are terrific. There’s no reason why any of the characters or the actors that play in those characters are not part of the DCU. There’s nothing that prohibits that from happening.”
“We’ll incorporate characters from the past, but mostly we’ll cast anew,” added the producer of Aquaman and Suicide Squad.
The same goes for the creator of these recent projects. Gunn and Safran would love to reteam with Flash filmmaker Andy Muschietti. Currently, James Wan is focusing on finishing Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.
Then there’s Bue Beetle premiering August 18, “that sort of has its world and fits in directly into our DCU,” followed by a Christmas day release of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, which will lead into the universe that Gunn and Safran are mapping out.
“As everyone here probably knows, the history of DC is pretty messed up. There is the Arrowverse. There as the DC EU which then split became the Joss Whedon Justice League at one point, became the Snyder-verse at the other point. There was Superman and Lois, there was the Reeves-verse. There’s all these different things,” Gunn said at the top of the session. “Even us, we came in and did Suicide Squad and that became Peacemaker and all of a sudden Bat-mite is a real guy that’s never been set up. No one was minding the mint, they were just giving away IP like they were party favors to any creators that smiled at them.”
So what of Todd Phillips’ sequel Joker: Folie a Deux? As previously reported, Safran confirmed that such veers from his and Gunn’s plan will be “labeled clearly as DC-Elseworlds, just like the comics do.” Also still in the works? J.J. Abrams’ Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Black Superman project. A draft is being waited upon.
“The bar is going to be very high for projects outside of the DCU,” asserted Safran. In regards to DC’s known reshoots, Gunn promised, “people have become beholden to dates, to holding dates, to getting movies made no matter what. At the end of the day, I’m a writer at my heart, and we’re not going to be making movies before the screenplay is finished. And if that means our plan has to shift a little bit-it’s going to happen, we know it’s going to happen . . . we’re not going to be making movies and putting hundreds of millions of dollars in a film where a screenplay is only two-thirds of the way done and we have to finish it while we’re making the movie. I’ve seen it happen again and again, and it’s a mess. I think it’s the primary reason for the deterioration in the quality of films today versus 30 years ago.”
Gunn mentioned how in Suicide Squad, he did no reshoots, and on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, he did a day of picking up, “and it’s because of having screenplays prepared before we shoot. I don’t want to get into this massive spending of hundreds of millions of dollars on reshoots.”
The film projects in the first portion of Gunn and Sagran’s “Gods and Monsters” include:
- A Superman Legacy feature, “this is really the start of the DCU,” says Safran. The project was already announced by the duo with Gunn writing. No director attached, but Safran was elbowing Gunn yesterday that he’d really like him to the helm. The release date is July 11, 2025. “It’s not an origins story, it focuses on Superman’s balancing his Kryptonian heritage with his human upbringing. He’s the embodiment of truth, justice, and the American way, his kindness in a world that thinks of kindness as old fashioned.”
- The Authority feature. “There’s a great wildstorm character that was popular for a long-time and we’re incorporating them into DCU,” says Gunn. He loves the property because it’s a mix of antiheroes who take matters into their own hands despite what governments advise. An introductory story is being written out. The Authority was created after the destruction of StormWatch, a planetary defense force against aliens. The former group member, Jenny Sparks, created the Authority with her stormWatch Black teammates Swift and Jack Hawksmoor. The team includes the Engineer (Angela Spica), Jeroen Thornedike (the latest Doctor), Apollo, and Midnighter.
- The Brave and the Bold feature. This will be Gunn and Safran’s version of the DCU Batman outside what Matt Reeves already created. The movie will feature Batman and his son, Damien Wayne, as Robin “who is a little son of a bitch,” bills Gunn. “Assassin, murderer who Batman takes on, who is Batman’s actual son that he doesn’t know exists for the first 8-10 years of his life . . . it’s a strange father and son story about the two of them and based on Grant Morrison’s run of the Batman.” Added Safran: “This is going to feature other members of the extended Bat-Family. Just because we feel like they’ve been left out of the Batman stories in the theater for far too long.” Gunn says that Reeves’ Batman 2 script is still in the works, and once that comes to fruition, “it’s something we’ll have to balance out with this movie.” The duo revealed that Reeve’s Batman 2 will be an October 3, 2025 release. While Robert Pattinson is the Dark Knight for Reeves, Gunn, and Safran will seek a new actor to play Batman for the Brave and the Bold. While they floated Ben Affleck’s name again as a director at the DCU, they didn’t name him for a project.
- Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow feature is based on Tom King’s comic book series from 2022. “In our series we see the difference between Superman who was sent to Earth and raised by loving parents from the time he was an infant, versus Supergirl who was raised on a rock, a chip off Krypton, and watched everyone around her die and be killed in terrible ways for the first 14 years of her life, and then came to Earth when she was a young girl. She’s much more hardcore, she’s not exactly the Supergirl we’re use to seeing.”
- Swamp Thing feature will investigate the dark origins of the creature. Tonally, different from Superman and Batman and Robin. The belief here from the duo is that darker characters will interact with the mainstream DC characters. There was a Swamp Thing movie in 1982 starring Adrienne Barbeau, which also spawned a 1989 sequel. Then there was a 2019 CW series. “It’s important to point out that in these stories, although they’re interconnected, they’re not all tonally the same. Each set of filmmakers bring their own aesthetic to these films, and the fun is seeing how these tonally different works mash-up in the future.” Saran added the project and how it relates to the rest of the slate.
Gunn elaborated: “Everything doesn’t always look the same. Everything doesn’t always have the same expression. Different artists bring remarkably different looks, feels and tones. This is not the Gunnverse.” That was a lesson he learned from his Marvel experience. “What I’ve found through Marvel, what wasn’t exciting was when movies were tonally the same. What was exciting was when you had something like Guardians come out and everyone was like ‘How is this raccoon going to be dealing with this God of Thunder? That’s going to be weird.'”
Some rules the duo will abide by in creating their universe: Anyone cast on the DC TV side as a character will also play that character on the film side. No one actor will play two parts. Hence, Momoa is Aquaman going forward, not Lobo.
What does the thrifty, cost-cutting Warner Discovery CEO David Zaslav think of this plan? Will he go cheap on DC? Not so, per Safran. “Their investment in content creation is huge. There’s no question we have the resources. We’re going to put these scripts together, get our directors and then discuss with Zaslav what the appropriate spend is on each of these. I have zero doubt that they will commit appropriate funds on each one. Stakes are enormous, it was a brand in chaos and it’s an opportunity to build an extraordinary standalone studio with the best IP and best stories in the world.”
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